Sunday, 4 August 2013

I call this
a “history lesson” because it actually has little relevance for the potential
of modern-day Heck cattle, but is still worth to be explored. Often it is
stated in news articles and videos that Heck cattle partly descends from
Spanish Fighting cattle, Lidia. Lidia is the first breed that comes to many
people’s mind when thinking of a “primitive cattle breed”, it is known for its
wild nature and many of them look like small versions of the aurochs. But in
fact it is very unlikely that the Spanish fighting bull had any significant
influence on Heck cattle.

Honestly,
nobody can tell how many and which breeds exactly contributed to the Heck
cattle population. Probably not even the Heck brothers themselves could if they
were still alive because they did not keep track of their crosses sufficiently.
But we must assume that no individual from the Berlin lineage bred by Lutz Heck
survived beyond 1945, so that modern Heck cattle are exclusively the result of
Heinz Heck’s work. This narrows the number of founding breeds, and the Spanish
fighting bull was not among them. In fact, Heinz Heck did not use that breed.
While Lutz Heck relied on southern-European breeds to a large degree (many of
his crosses were exclusively from Camargue, Lidia and Corsican cattle), Heinz
Heck did not use Camargue and Lidia, for whatever reason. He used more derived
breeds like Angeln instead, what can be considered a mistake from the modern
view point.

But the
case is not closed yet. Heinz Heck remarked in 1933 that he was planning to
exchange individuals with those of his brother, therefore it is possible that
some Lidia-crossbreeds found their way into Heinz’s breed. However, there are
no later remarks on whether this exchange was executed and if so, which
individuals were used. So the possibility of Lidia being one of the founding
breeds of Heck cattle remains very small. Photos of historic Heck cattle might
provide a further clue. There are only very few such photos in the web, but in Walter
Frisch’s book Der Auerochs – Das
europäische Rind, 2010, you can see some of them. Apparently the earliest
Heck cattle during the 1940s and 1950s were very bulky animals (like some still
are today) with no indication that they might be related to the Spanish
fighting bull. But there was a bull called “Schultheiß”, born in 1956, that
looked a bit Lidia-influenced; it had a more athletic body than the other individuals,
also with a hump at the shoulders. However, the photo shows the animal running,
so its body shape is not easy to judge correctly and might have been more bulky
than it appeared on the photo. All in all, I don’t know of any Heck cattle,
living or historic, that display features present in Lidia and not present in
the breeds used by Heinz Heck (what would imply the presence of Lidia in the
gene pool), such as clearly forwards-facing horns or an athletic body shape
with a large hump. If there was indeed Lidia influence in historic Heck cattle,
it is likely that breeders selected against individuals that were too difficult
to handle, so that there would be barely anything left today. To put it in a
nutshell, there is no conclusive reason to assume that Heck cattle have any
influence from the Spanish fighting bull.

So where
did Heck cattle get the wild colour and (remotely) aurochs-like horns from? Well,
it consequently must have been mostly the influence of Corsican cattle and
selective breeding.

I think the
reason for many people claiming that Heck cattle partly descend from the
Spanish fighting bull is either sloppy research (some might even not
distinguish between Corsican cattle and Fighting cattle because they are both
Southern European breeds and look similar) or because the Spanish fighting bull
is the only “primitive” Southern European cattle most people in Central and
Northern Europe have an idea of, and it is a very aurochs-like one, while
Corsican cattle is comparably unknown.

But, not to
forget, there now is a number of Heck cattle which do have Lidia influence due
to mixing with Taurus cattle, but most representatives of the breed do not.

There also
is the myth of Heck cattle being particularly aggressive towards humans because
of the Lidia influence. But since most Heck cattle do not have influence from
that breed, this cannot be the reason for the allegedly aggressive behaviour.
In fact Heck cattle is no aggressive breed at all. Most breeders will confirm
to you that they are tame and docile. If they are kept semi-feral on large areas
and have few contact with humans, it is only natural that their behaviour gets
more difficult to handle, but that’s true for any cattle breed. And of course
Heck cows defend their calves just as feisty as other cattle breeds.

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About this blog

This blog is on everything related to the so-called “breeding-back” of extinct animals: From the extinct animals themselves, over their often domestic descendants and dedomestication to news and facts about various breeding-back projects, reports and photos from my own breeding-back related trips. I try to have a balanced and fact-based approach to this subject and to dismantle many of the popular myths. Enjoy!

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About me

I am an Austrian student of biology/zoology at the University of Vienna. My major interest always have been extinct animals, from dinosaurs to Pleistocene megafauna and more recent extinctions. Besides that I am interested in evolution, genetics and ecology.
I am also an amateur animal artist, making drawings and models mostly of extinct animals.